Lee Ann Womack Doesn’t Recognize Country Music Anymore

Lee Ann Womack is having trouble recognizing country music in 2018, she says. During a recent episode of the PBS show Overheard with Evan Smith, the "I Hope You Dance" star got a bit flustered as she answered a question about modern country music.

"What they call country music now — mass-market country music — is obviously not country music," Womack insists in a clip from the episode, which she shared on her Instagram account on Tuesday (June 12). "I don’t know what it is. It’s sort of pop music I guess. I don’t know."

She adds in her Instagram caption: "Sometimes the truth just sort of slips out ..." and a zipped mouth emoji.

"I’m a singer," she says. Womack released her album The Lonely, The Lonesome & the Gone last year. "I love to sing. Country music to me is the greatest. It’s American music. It’s the greatest form of music. It’s beautiful when it’s done well and it’s done right, so that’s my favorite. I don’t worry so much about defining things. I know country music when I hear it."

The country singer stuck around to talk about growing up in Texas, the first time she heard her song "I Hope You Dance" and just how much the music business has changed thanks to different distribution models through the years.

"It has changed tremendously," she explains in an episode that premiered Tuesday. "Nobody is making the money that we were when we first started back in the late nineties. I feel like I am only on this earth for a certain amount of time and you can only have so much money. I’ve lived a life with it and without it. It’s never been a motivating factor for me."